Deborah Healey's Theory and Research: Autonomy and Language Learning

Healey's article that we read for this week focuses on the learner really taking control over what he or she is learning, otherwise known as having autonomy. To Healey, this is more than just putting students in a language lab or having motivated student but it is more of a way that a learner makes adult decisions about learning. She mentions Oxford's four different perspectives of autonomy: technical where there is a focus on the physical situation, psychological where there is focus on the characteristics of learners, sociocultural where there is a focus on mediated learning, and also the political-critical perspective where there is a focus on ideologies, access, and power structure.

The first part of her article teaches us about the background for autonomous learning and the other forms of learning that are dependent on the setting, the role of learning styles and strategies, age, individual versus group work, cultural relevance, and also control and locus of power. The latter half of her article brings examples about Oxford's four different perspectives of autonomy and discusses them in more depth. She brings up issues of content and setting in the technical perspective, she talks about the needs of a language learner in general and also language learning in groups and communities, and finally goes more in depth about the political-critical perspective of autonomy and power.

In my opinion, Healey explains very well this style of teaching. There are certainly a lot of factors that a teacher must keep in mind when dealing with autonomy in language learning. It is of course much harder to bring autonomy to younger students or students who have no desire to be learning about the subject matter. Our goal as teachers is to make it easier for our students to access the content that they desire and have more control in what they would like to learn. In addition, the different perspectives bring different ways of learning in CALL. This is important because not everyone has the same way of learning a language and it is our job to find the right balance of how much autonomy each student will have. Personally, I would like my students to continue with learning French as a foreign language, even if they do not continue in a classroom. In my class this semester, my students do not have very much autonomy but in my future classes, I think that this would be helpful to the students if done correctly of course. I hope that with the autonomy will be the perfect motivation for them to continue in their language studies.